Sheriff fires off letter to Feinstein on gun control

Riverside County's top cop has written U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to urge her to abandon a proposal for a national ban on certain firearms that he says transgresses the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Sheriff Stan Sniff fired off a three-page letter to the Democratic senator from San Francisco on Friday, to weigh in on Feinstein's proposal to ban specific types of guns in the aftermath of the December massacre of 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school.

Feinstein earlier authored a similar federal ban that went into effect in 1994 and expired in 2004.

After reviewing the new bill, Sniff said he is opposed to the measure and is urging Congress to defeat it. According to Feinstein's office, the legislation would prohibit the sale, transfer, importation and manufacture of 157 military-style assault weapons, rifles, pistols and shotguns, as well as ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds.

The legislation is numbered S. 150 and titled the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013.

"In many ways your bill unreasonably impinges on the Second Amendment, and it focuses largely on purely 'cosmetic' features of legitimate sporting, hunting and recreational firearms already in widespread use within our nation," Sniff wrote. "The cosmetic issues alone cause far too much meaningless complexity for law enforcement officers, and worse, could cause common citizens to unintentionally commit crimes that have serious potential sanctions."

Sniff's letter came one day after Feinstein's office put out a news release listing a wide range of supporters for her legislation, including more than a dozen law enforcement organizations and officials. Those listed included the sheriff of Los Angeles County and the police chiefs of San Diego and Los Angeles.

According to the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, Feinstein had not responded to the letter as of Tuesday afternoon. And Feinstein did not respond Tuesday to a request from the U-T Californian seeking comment.

However, Tom Mentzer, Feinstein's press secretary, suggested the legislation does not in fact violate the Second Amendment.

"The fact that neither the current California assault weapons law nor the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban -- both similar to this bill -- have been declared unconstitutional, calls the constitutional argument into question," Mentzer said by email.

Sniff, who has been in law enforcement since 1975 and is a retired Army Reserve colonel, suggested that many politicians and others who favor increased restrictions are inaccurately characterizing the guns they want to take out of circulation.

"What really concerns me is that the term 'assault weapon' or 'assault rifle' is a misnomer, coined by gun control advocates that also incorrectly use that term with the phrase 'weapons of war'... in an effort to frighten or confuse the public," Sniff said.

"These civilian-style semi-automatic rifles are essentially no different -- other than cosmetics -- than millions of other semi-automatic rifles used by civilians for hunting, competition and sporting purposes -- for generations of Americans for over a century," he wrote.

The sheriff, who engages in local competitions through a recreational shooting group called The Cowboys, then took aim at the gun model perhaps most often mentioned in conjunction with the proposed ban.